They both looked up at me when I stepped into the room. “He’s dead, Camalyn,” Dernwerd said in a shaky voice.
I was briefly annoyed. How many times had I told the other teachers to address me as “Headmistress,” at least in front of the students? Then the words registered. “Dead?” I repeated. “Morben? Is dead? That’s not possible!”
Audra looked at me with her cool green eyes. She’s only a couple of decades younger than I am, but she looks at least fifty years my junior, and that’s only one of the many things I can’t stand about her. “Take a look for yourself,” she invited. “But I wouldn’t advise you to get too close until we’ve ascertained what happened.”
I crossed the room in the stately way I’ve cultivated and came to a halt a few feet away from the corpse. Yes, there could be no doubt about it. Morben was dead. His face had a riven, petrified look, his mouth gaped in a silent scream, and his eyes gazed up at some unbearable horror. His hands were clenched around his throat as if to choke out his own life or claw at spectral hands bent on that very task. He did not move or breathe or radiate any life heat at all.
I had hated the man, but I had certainly never expected him to come to an end like this. I stared down at him. “What happened to him?”
Dernwerd gestured at the students. “They said he was in the middle of a class on Transmogrification when he suddenly started shrieking and pointing at something on the ceiling. They all looked, of course, but didn’t see a thing there. Then he started grabbing at his neck and contorting all around as though someone was squeezing the life out of him. Then he dropped to the floor and he died. In minutes, they said.”
I glanced back at the students, a room away but obviously listening to every word. “Is that true?”
They looked at each other and nodded. “Just like he said,” confirmed one girl who looked about twelve. I know that magic folk age differently than mortals do, and I’m 105 myself, so everyone looks young to me, but I cannot believe we are now admitting children to the school. She was probably eighteen and a very knowing girl, but she looked so young and so innocent that I moved a little to shield her eyes from a view of the body. “He screamed and screamed, until he started choking, then he kept making these terrible little grunting sounds. Like he was trying to tell us something. But we couldn’t see anything. We couldn’t do anything. It happened so fast.”
I looked back at Morben, ghastly and terrified. What could possibly have killed one of the most powerful wizards in the kingdom? Despite Audra’s caution to stand clear of the body, I had decided to take a pace closer when the corpse abruptly disintegrated into a smoking pile of black ash. I stepped back hurriedly and brushed some cinder from my sleeve.
“I think we’d better cancel classes for the day,” I said, keeping my voice steady to disguise my sudden shakiness. “Time to convene a council of mages.”
–
The Norwitch Academy of Magic and Sorcery had been founded three centuries ago and enjoyed great prestige and prosperity ever since. I was the seventh wizard to ascend to the top position in the school, a feat I had accomplished thirty-eight years before, and the first to preside over an investigation of murder. Not a distinction I particularly wished to claim.
A staff of twenty professors reported to me, and between us we taught a student body of four hundred students. A countless number of cooks, laundresses, gardeners, and stableboys also lived on the premises, making sure life at the school ran smoothly. Thus, in theory, there were close to five hundred suspects in this unsettling murder case.
In actuality, however, the number could be narrowed down to five without any trouble at all. There were, in the entire kingdom, only half a dozen wizards with the knowledge and power to cast a death spell that actually worked. All six of them worked at the Academy, and one was now dead.
The other five of us sat in my office and looked at each other with expressions of mistrust and wonder.
“So!” I said briskly, folding my hands before me on my ornate desk. “I suppose all of you have heard the dreadful news by now. Morben is dead, and someone killed him, and we need to try to discover who and why.”
“The why is simple enough,” Audra said with some contempt. She sat in one of my stiff high-backed chairs as if it was a comfortably stuffed divan, and her gold robe molded itself to her long legs. Dernwerd, Borrin, and Xander couldn’t keep their watery old eyes off her. “He was a foul-mouthed, lecherous, mean-spirited hack, and everybody hated him.”
“It’s true that he was a difficult man, but you needn’t speak so harshly,” Dernwerd mumbled in his irritating, apologetic way. As if he thought that even in death Morben might reach out to slap him if he didn’t talk nice.
“Yes, but to disapprove of him and to kill him are two very different things,” Xander said. Xander was a lean, bald, punctilious scholar who would argue the most minute point of history or spell-work till you wanted to run screaming from the room.
“Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t been done away with long before now,” Borrin drawled. Supercilious, wealthy family background, north-country accent-Borrin does think he’s the most elegant of the wizards, though I’m pretty sure he uses magic to keep his hair silver and his figure trim. I can respect his abilities, which are formidable, but not his vanity.
You will be thinking by now that I dislike almost everyone in my employ, and you would be right. In fact, I am a terrible misanthrope, and my attitude is even worse when it comes to wizards and warlocks. Call me a misosorcerer and be done with it! But I inherited all five senior members of my faculty when I joined the school, and I was under contract to keep them. Trust me, otherwise I would have ousted Morben when I first came on board, and I might have fired the other four while I was at it. Though honesty compels me to admit that all of them, even Audra, are ferociously talented mages.
And all of them have the ability, if not the inclination, to kill a man by magic.
“Well, he’s dead now,” I said. “And it seems obvious that one of the five of us murdered him.”
They all looked at each other and at me, and none of them said a word.
“The students didn’t recognize the spell they described, but I did, and I assume you did as well,” I went on. “It can be found in the Hazelton Grimoire, though a variant without the screaming is indexed in Mortensen’s Spellbook, and only the five of us have the knowledge to unlock either of those volumes, let alone the strength to speak the enchantment. So one of us killed him. Why?”
Dernwerd was on his feet, pointing at Audra. “You’re the one who always hated him!” So much for his usual conciliatory manner. “I heard you! Just yesterday in the hall! I heard you tell him that if he touched you again, you’d turn him to ice and iron!”
“And I would have, but he didn’t,” Audra said furiously. “Aren’t you the one he embarrassed in front of his whole class last week, when you couldn’t recapture the igliat and had to get Morben’s help? He said you had the skill of a Rank Five wizard and shouldn’t be allowed to teach advanced classes.”
Dernwerd’s face was the same gray color as his hair. “How did you know that?”
She shrugged one thin shoulder. “A couple of the students told me. They thought it was funny.”
Borrin was smiling in that detestable way, and Xander gave him a long, thorough look. “You smile now, but you didn’t think it was so funny when Morben called you an up-country upstart with imaginary bloodlines,” he said in his painstaking way. I had no doubt that he had reproduced the quote with shattering accuracy.